I find it interesting how stuff that was relevant for PCs in the 80s became relevant for early smartphones. I believe computing history often is cyclic in nature, so there is value in the old ways.
I always thought of any human progress like gradient descent algo. Hindsight is clear, and if current tools/services/methods/processes don't work, look at how it used to be done. Was it better objectively? May be we took a step in the wrong direction, go back and learn; try to take in a different direction, may be there is a higher ground ahead. It is also important to allow (and be tolerant) to experimentation in different directions because without it; we risk getting stuck in a local optima forever. Opposite of that is Chesterton's fence, there is a reason why we are on this hill, if you go back, it's a steep cliff.
"The Wheel Of Reincarnation". Seriously, it's called that. Ideas from mainframes show up as "new, innovative ideas" on minicomputers, and then on micros/PS, and now on phones.
I am familiar with that as "The Law of Recapitulation" based on a discarded idea from Biology. I can't find any references now, but the idea was that the evolution of mainframe computers (memory sizes, features such as caches, and so on) was repeated years later by minicomputers and even later by microcomputers. Knowing this I was able to design very advanced micros in the early 1980s since I knew what the future would be like.
"The Wheel Of Reincarnation" described by Ivan Sutherland is closely related, but is based on the idea that computing history is more like a spiral than a straight line, so the future is more similar to the past than to the present.
